D&D General Why are we fighting?

[Lanefan]

Indeed, I originally accidentally clicked on you via the autofill and didn't notice it until after I saved the post, then went back in and edited it. My apologies for dragging you into the thread!

No worries - I was meaning to check it out anyway.

 

[Faolyn]

I think the opposite choice should have been made: less numbers bloat; keep the idea that one standard creature is roughly equal to one PC.

Agreed... but what's a standard creature?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Agreed... but what's a standard creature?

Well, at least in The Edition That Must Not Be Named, a standard creature is...just that. The "baseline," mathematically speaking, for a given challenge level. "Standard" is thus contrasted against "minion" (or "mook" in similar systems), "Elite," and "Solo." A minion(/mook) is much more fragile than a Standard, but still packs a punch, the weak "cannon fodder" type. An elite creature is meaningfully stronger than normal, drawing on the thematic trope of the "crack team" of better-trained, better-equipped soldiers, though it need not actually mean that in practice (e.g. imagine a swarm of hive-mind insects, with throwaway mindless drones as minions, led by a more powerful but harder-to-raise "centurion" bug or the like.) A solo is a creature meant to be a challenge to a whole party all on its own.

A "standard" creature in other contexts is usually intended to mean one where if you had a squad of just that creature and nothing else, and that squad was the same size as the PC party, then it would provide a relatively ordinary encounter. Probably not deadly, but definitely intended to not be a cakewalk either.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Agreed... but what's a standard creature?

I think what's he saying is that the default design for a reasonable encounter should have been an equal number of monsters to PCs. So standard would be whatever achieved that.

This would be more similar to 4E in design, which tended to have fewer, more significant enemies (but also used minions for when you wanted numbers).

 

[Hussar]

I think that's true at lower levels or if you're comparing only to 4E.

However, increasing HP is still very much a primary part of making creatures more difficult.

I've thankfully had a good DM in my usual face-to-face group, and they're comfortable with doing a lot of their own monster design.

But, by the book, a lot of high-level challenges still tend toward being bags of HP.

There's also a lack of granularity when it comes to resistance in 5E. So, a lot of creatures effectively do have more HP. The game simultaneously says that magic items shouldn't be assumed and designs monsters using a very binary method of determining resistance (which hinges upon having or not having items).

My opinion is that I would have rather kept the 4E-style encounter design (with more creatures and more moving parts,) but went with numbers for building monsters (and the 'physics engine' of the game world) that are more similar to older editions of D&D.

Again, I'm not seeing this.

A party between 5th and 10th generally does about 25 hp/PC/round. Give or take. Meaning that you can pace your encounters pretty easily. By 11th level, that increases to about 35 hp/PC/round. Again, if you have 5 PC's, then they're doing about 150 points of damage per round. Again, combats shouldn't be lasting much more than 3-4 rounds.

Which is where the problem with morale and running away comes in. If combat ends after 3 or 4 rounds, there's almost no time between failing morale and all dead.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Doesn't the 5e model rely on 6-8 combats per long rest to drain resources so the last fights (vs the Boss) are dangerous? If combats end when 25% of the enemies are defeated or a single monster takes 50% damage, won't that just leave the party mostly fresh when they get to the final dungeon encounters?

Well, yeah. That's a real issue. 5e PCs are powerful enough as it is, IMO.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Doesn't the 5e model rely on 6-8 combats per long rest to drain resources so the last fights (vs the Boss) are dangerous? If combats end when 25% of the enemies are defeated or a single monster takes 50% damage, won't that just leave the party mostly fresh when they get to the final dungeon encounters?

Indeed! The encounter pacing and design rules for 5e are far too preoccupied with seeming naturalistic and physically-rooted to be concerned about this. Practical gameplay experience concerns are secondary, if they're considered at all.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It’s 6-8 medium encounters per adventuring day. Kick those up to deadly and you only need 3-4.

The slog is when the PCs have burned the resources they’re going to and settled into the endless cantrip pew pew to finish off the fight. Dealing a few hits to the PCs from there and saying the monsters are dead saves time with the mechanical result being about 90% the same

It sounds like what you're looking for is a narrative solution to a mechanical problem. I can see something like that in the DMG as an optional rule, but to make it the default is a very different way to play D&D than some would want (myself included).

 

[Micah Sweet]

The question of fleeing also ignores all possible contexts except for everyone’s in melee with someone and there are zero ways to escape. If you’re having dynamic fights, there are going to be ways to escape. Horses and other mounts, flying and flying creatures, magic and magic items of all kinds. “You can’t ever escape” is a weird take.

Nothing in my experience irritates a table of players more than the bad guy getting away, even if they have a perfectly legitimate way to do so.

 

[Oofta]

Indeed! The encounter pacing and design rules for 5e are far too preoccupied with seeming naturalistic and physically-rooted to be concerned about this. Practical gameplay experience concerns are secondary, if they're considered at all.

Guidelines have never been precise in any edition I've played.